Toward a McCarthaginian Peace

The first six months of 1953 was a period to warm the cockles of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's heart. He bounced from headline to headline, denouncing the use of Communist books in U.S.-sponsored overseas libraries, challenging with cloakroom innuendo the appointment of Charles Bohlen as ambassador to Russia, engaging in a transatlantic cat fight with Britain's Clement Attlee. But with the adjournment of Congress, McCarthy had to scramble to keep his name in the big black type. He was beginning to sag as a topic of conversation when Harry Truman came to his aid by injecting Joe into the Harry Dexter White case--in which McCarthy had had no part. Last week, with public hearings regarding Communism in the Army Signal Corps radar laboratories at Fort Monmouth, N.J., McCarthy was bouncing again.

Last October, while on his honeymoon in the West Indies, McCarthy learned that the Army had suspended several Fort Monmouth employees as "security risks." With that, the honeymoon was over. McCarthy flew to New York and " began closed hearings. Unidentified witnesses scuttled in and out, rumors of missing microfilm and sinister scientists filtered through, and from time to time McCarthy emerged with dark reports of a Communist espionage ring organized by Atom Spy Julius Rosenberg, which "may still be in existence" at Fort Monmouth.

Some papers played nebulous rumors about the evidence as fact; other papers asserted that McCarthy was getting nowhere. Either way, Joe got the headlines. But the time came when McCarthy was willing to agree with Army Secretary Robert Stevens that the whole probe should be called off. At that point, last month, Stevens took a step that was either a courageous act or a big mistake. At a press conference, two reporters, whose stories had been critical of McCarthy's hearings, needled Stevens into saying: "We have been unable to find anything relating to espionage." McCarthy burned and bored into the counterpunch. He grimly promised to open up the hearings and "let the evidence speak for itself." The Harry Dexter White case, which had given Joe $300,000 worth of free TV time, greatly enhanced interest in his revival of the Fort Monmouth hearings.

From the Grave. Thirty-three Fort Monmouth employees already had been suspended by the Signal Corps, not as a result of McCarthy's investigation. Some had been reinstated; most were awaiting hearings. Of the 33, McCarthy called only one, Aaron Coleman, a classmate of Julius Rosenberg at the City College of New York, who went to Fort Monmouth in 1939, became a radar laboratory chief.

On the witness stand, Coleman admitted attending a Communist meeting with Rosenberg 16 years ago during their senior year at C.C.N.Y., but he swore that he had never seen, heard from or corresponded with Rosenberg after they left college. McCarthy, who admitted he had no living witnesses to prove the story, confronted Coleman with testimony from Rosenberg's trial: Rosenberg said that while an inspector at Fort Monmouth in the early 1940's, he had seen Coleman there. Said McCarthy, threatening a perjury citation against Coleman: "Testimony from the grave is admissible here."

Andrew J. Reid, chief intelligence agent at Fort Monmouth, testified that in 1946 a guard caught Coleman leaving the radar laboratories with secret documents. Coleman was asked if he had other such papers at home. "At first, he denied it," said Reid. "The second time, he said 'maybe.' and the third time, he said 'yes.' " A search revealed 43 documents, many of them marked classified, on a desk in Coleman's room. Coleman, called to the stand, told McCarthy he had taken the papers home to study.

To Harvard? At that, Coleman was one of the most cooperative witnesses. In ten days of hearings, 23 witnesses, not all of them Fort Monmouth alumni although most had worked for the Signal Corps, refused to answer questions. Some of them need not have bowed even to McCarthy in the calculated art of making news. Among them:

P:Albert Shadowitz, an employee from 1943 to 1951 of a company doing Signal Corps work, refused to answer questions. The day after he received his subpoena to appear before McCarthy, Shadowitz said, he drove to Princeton, and talked for an hour to Dr. Albert Einstein, whom he had never met before. Said Shadowitz: "I discussed this matter personally with Dr. Einstein in Princeton, and he advised me not to cooperate with this or any otl.er committee of the same nature." Replied McCarthy, by no means loth to have Einstein's name help his own into print: "I would suggest if you don't want to spend considerable time in jail that you advise with your lawyer rather than Dr. Einstein."

P:Leonard E. Mins thoughtfully provided newsmen with a typewritten translation of Latin quotations which he read to McCarthy from a black, loose-leaf notebook. Mins, described by McCarthy as a veteran Communist writer who had access to classified radar information in 1943, was asked if he had ever engaged in espionage for Russia. He answered: "Nemini delatorum fides abrogata."* Then he added wryly: "My answer also includes a citation from the Fifth Amendment." McCarthy, who knows a good performer when he sees one, was almost tolerant of Mins.

P:Mrs. Sylvia Berke, who was employed at Fort Monmouth in 1943. denied that she was a member of the Communist Party then. With her lawyer beside her, a study in distress, Mrs. Berke said that she was not a Communist last Sept. 15, but refused to say if she had been one Sept. 13. McCarthy told her that if she is fired from her position as a school clerk in The Bronx, she "might apply for a job over at Harvard--there seems to be a privileged sanctuary over there for Fifth Amendment cases."

P: Harry A. Hyman, a New York insurance man whom McCarthy called "a sleazy character and an underground espionage agent for the Communists," refused to tell anything except his age--31. Four witnesses identified Hyman as a Communist. McCarthy produced records indicating that Hyman in the last two years had made nearly 500 telephone calls to U.S. defense installations, including Fort Monmouth.

Midway in the hearings, McCarthy offered a new description of his purposes. Said he: "We do not feel it is a function of the committee to ... prove espionage beyond a reasonable doubt. We feel it is sufficient to prove espionage--potential espionage--to a sufficient degree so as to convince security officers of various establishments."

Within this limited framework, the Fort Monmouth hearings were a success: espionage was not proved, but evidence of a nature to give security officers the shudders was produced. Even so, bitter doubts were raised that McCarthy's aims were worth the cost. Walter Millis wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that the McCarthy investigation had demoralized the Fort Monmouth scientists to a "truly scandalous" extent. "The process of witch-hunting, bigotry, cowardice, race prejudice and sheer incompetence" has turned "one of our top-level, military-scientific operations into a mare's nest of exasperation, fear and futility," said Millis.

McCarthy, still smarting over Secretary Stevens' remark, adjourned his hearings until after the Christmas holidays--when he will return, determined to enforce a McCarthaginian peace on Fort Monmouth.

* From Suetonius, discussing the reign of Tiberius (14-37 A.D.), freely translated: "The word of no informer was doubted."

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